The new Microsoft Search engine Bing has been creating quite a buzz on the web. For many shop owners, this buzz has been a bit hard to track and analyze properly because Google Analytics (used by millions of websites) is not currently including Bing in the “Search Engine” specific traffic stats. Clearly we can still track most if not all of the information we need from the referral section under Referring Sites and then bing.com / referral .

However, many shop owners are in a big hurry to track Bing and it’s growth, and many are seeing a drop in the “Search Engine Traffic” as Live is gone and Bing is not included.

Google announced yesterday that they were working to include Bing in the proper traffic class “Search Engine Traffic”. However, Google was helpful in providing a short term work around if you just cannot wait for the Bing upgrade as follows:

You can use the following additional parameter for your Analytics script to properly reclassify Bing traffic.

pageTracker._addOrganic(“bing”, “q”);

Additional documentation for tracking setup is found here. Remember, this tracking is only a temporary fix and will need to be removed once Google Upgrades the platform properly for Bing.